The storms of life that we all weather are what define us. Looking at the gloriously deep colors, feeling thunderstruck with epiphany, seeing a brilliant bolt of lightning - these are the feelings I want to share. Nothing is black or white. Everything has shades of gray.

About Me

Kymberlie Ingalls is native to the Bay Area in California. She is a pioneer in blogging, having self-published online since 1997. Her style is loose, experimental, and a journey in stream of consciousness.
Works include personal essay, prose, short fictional stories, and a memoir in progress.
Thank you for taking a moment of your time to visit. Beware of the occasional falling opinions. For editing services: http://www.rainfallpress.com/

Thursday, February 22, 2018

I think it’s going to be a long,
long time til touchdown brings me ‘round again to find I’m not the girl they
think I am at home…

Time is not a luxury.It is the most expendable asset there is for humankind.We spend our minutes quickly and without
regard.

I have made peace with leaving some things unlived.I have no need to chase a silly old bucket of
adventures because focusing on the big things makes it easier to miss the
little bits along the way.The smaller
pieces are the essence of us.

My little bits have been harder to find as of late.Is it because I’m dwindling in the eyes of
the world or am I too afraid to let the world see me anymore?What’s left of me.My life has become so viewable that there’s
nothing left for myself.I feel like an
empty well – pennies landing at the bottom of my soul with a dull thump.I’ve become so used to having these
conversations with myself, I’ve forgotten to need other voices.

We tend to talk to ourselves when there’s nobody around
to listen.

What I forget – besides everything – is that most
people are often afraid to be heard.Silence
is easier.When my voice becomes an
echo, it carries my fears as it comes back around.I become afraid that others no longer want to
hear what I have to say.Perhaps this is
a consequence of the times; everyone has a platform, it’s common to feel
obsolete. Their silence, however, left me quite alone in a time I needed least to be.

Something has been gnawing inside of me like a gutter rat
trying to escape daylight.It scuttles
in futility until it dies, leaving the foul odor of a neglected death.The cause of death:loneliness.I have this great fear that the events of this past year – my two near
physical deaths eclipsing my metaphorical one - have burrowed into my marriage
and left us staring at each other across the grave.Inherently, I think we’re going to be okay –
that we just need some space to process it all – but it’s still frightening.Love never really dies, but it can change,
and we all know I don’t do well with change. He has taken on the roles vacated by others, because they failed to show up. This has changed our dynamics a bit.

Yesterday, I had this amazing conversation with
someone.It was 32 years ago that I
first heard Bob talking to me from the television.I was 16 years old; angry, imprisoned, mired
in eating disorders and wanting to hide in the darkest places of the universe.I was sometimes able to lose myself in funny
things, and stand-up comedy became a haven for me.They were the bravest people I ever saw,
standing there all alone talking to us about very real things.Bob was different.He wanted us to think.Every word he slung was a challenge.His sarcasm was an art form, his disdain of
humanity had an odd allure, and it penetrated at a time I was unreachable.When I look back at how I came to harness my
inner power – my darkness, my questioning (even questionable) nature, my dry
wit and penetrating pause – I can trace it back to someone who never knew his
role.

So, I got to sit down and have a conversation with
Bob.Being awkwardly me, I didn’t know
at first what to do with that.I’ve
become this person who has no filter whatsoever, so there’s a fear in what I’m
capable of saying.As we talked about
anything and all, there was a sense of being understood for the first time in a
very long while.I didn’t have to defend
my oddities.I could simply and unabashedly
be me.It’s not a secret me, but it was
a me who’d been cut out and amputated too.So there I was talking to this stranger, only he’d been in my life
forever.At one point I expressed my
fear of seeming like some crazed groupie, but Bob seemed okay with it.It wasn’t that I was star-struck.It was connecting with someone from my
past.Someone who never knew that he
knew me.

Then I found my bravery.“You helped shape who I am today.”That’s a thought I have occasionally expressed in my writing to very few,
but have never said out loud to anyone.

Life is meant to be lived out loud.

Someone penetrated at a time that I’ve been unreachable.I have allowed my loneliness to become a
wall.I miss me.And I miss who I was when I trusted
others.I came away feeling unafraid to
sit down and have this conversation with myself.It isn’t a magic that dropped out of the
sky.It’s going to take time and some
work to trust again.Bob may forget our
conversation as something insignificant though I hope it was a pleasant way to
spend an hour.I will likely forget
everything said because it’s what I’m prone to do.In writing this letter to myself, I’m adding
to my collection of little bits that are gathered in notes and essays and books
and sometimes in the memory of others.

I am afraid that my trust in others was a delusion; that I
wanted so badly to not die a neglected death that I believed something that
never was.I have learned to share the deepest,
dirtiest parts of me to anyone from a distance, but now can’t trust anyone
within a stone’s throw.

My minutes are being tossed into that empty well and landing
with a dull thump.I don’t know how to
come back from where I am.I’ve done it
before but I was another me then.My
unwanted survivalist instinct is shadowing me.It’s telling me that this isn’t how I want to go.

And my biggest fear is not being ready to go.

I miss the earth so much, I miss
my life.It’s lonely out in space on
such a timeless flight…

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Go ahead and cry now, just give
in to the madness.The only way to feel
your joy is first to feel the sadness…

It’s that time of year again.The first page on the calendar that prompts
us to climb our unresolved mountains before we come sliding back down at our
self-imposed December deadline.I’ve
never been into resolutions, yet never work well without a finite date to loom
over me.

Having stumbled past the ultimate deadline that I thought
Destiny had placed on me, I’m in a bit of a free fall at the moment.We’ve all been posed the philosophical
question “How would you spend your time if you knew when you were going to
die?”Been there, spent the time as
wisely as I thought best.I lived every
emotion; joy, sadness, laughter and melancholy.I’ve cried a hundred tears, a hundred thousand times.It turned out to be some sort of twisted
cosmic joke when I didn’t die as prophesized.Either I had misread the roadmap or Destiny moved the finish line on me.

Am I to find the answer at the top of my mountain?Because here at ground level, the question
remained – where do I go from here?

I felt that death would be a gift; an ending to a life that
had gone on too long.I was tired.I still feel twinges of it some days.People ask me how I’m doing and when I
respond with “okay,” they almost always return with “just okay?”They don’t understand – “okay” means I’m not
having that twinge.It’s funny how we can
see negatives and positives so differently from one another.

There are things in our lives that we have different names
for but they all amount to the same; gifts, blessings, good luck or
fortunes.What many consider to be a
blessing would be a sunny day.For me,
that would be a curse because of severe and rare health risks. To everyone
else, Kryptonite is just a pretty green glowing crystal.

It’s all about perception.

I’ve always known I was different from most.I have been the outsider to my own life,
feeling the need to justify or defend my existence and its variables.It was a linear way to the top of my
mountain.What I have learned to be my footholds
are things intangible.Love as it means
to me, the meaning of life and my purpose in its evolution.I say that I’m in a freefall, but it only
feels that way because my deadline is no longer as obvious as the summit above
me.Where challenges and chaos have defined
my path, I now feel there is reason.It
no longer has to be justified to anyone.It only needs to make sense to me.

Living each day as a lifetime is often a fleeting thing that
falls away with the drudgery of an obligated existence.Not for me; it is in me all of the time.It’s a lot to carry, but and because the
weight is not mine alone.There have
always been lessons, but over time the consequences weigh more.While my life has always felt like I was
climbing to nowhere, suddenly I understood that I’ll never get anywhere if I
continue to carry so much dead weight.The hard part has been figuring what or who am I going to need later and
what is best to cut loose now?

My friends have always been the most significant
treasures.They made up for the family I
wanted little part of.They’ve all had
their place and time, though it’s taken me a long time to realize that.Not everything is meant to last, and that
includes relationships.We think loyalty
is defined by forever and feel betrayed when everlasting comes to an end, but
we aren’t replacing the people in our journey, we are replenishing our
souls.

In the past calendar run, I have been called many things
from bitter and spiteful to kindhearted and a superhero.I’ve been advised way more than I am
comfortable with.I’m quite surprised I
still have a tongue left after having bitten it so often.In conversation with someone last month, I
alluded to a 25-year friendship that I’d severed last summer and he asked
quietly, “do you have any friends you
haven’t had a falling out with?”I was
hurt by that because it proved he wasn’t understanding things I’d been saying,
which had become the common theme with most of my friends, hence the falling
outs.It has become important to me to
stop giving more to everyone than I was getting in return.And it isn’t a quid pro quo thing.It’s a
harsh learning that I am not a superhero, and that I am vulnerable.

It’s still a long way to the top, and Kryptonite hides in
the darkest of places.

Someone asked me today “why is every story so negative?”Stuart was laughing as he asked, but there
was a nugget of truth.I was starting to
tell him a story and finished with “See?It’s not negative, it’s interesting.
And if I were on a stage telling it, it would be comedy gold.”In the same conversation, he commiserated
about my physical disabilities and conveyed a brief sadness when he asked “Have
you ever looked death in the face?” and I said that I had.“You’ve had a lot of challenge in your life.”That’s okay, I said.It’s given me a different point of view.

Life is all about perception.

It’s not so much about having survived my life.It’s the view that it’s given me.Have you ever stood at the top of the world
and looked up at a clear night sky?Not
all peaks are found at the top of a mountain.Sometimes they are on a sandy beach, an isolated field of dry grass, in
a clearing or at the top of a city hill.

I may be falling free, but that landing is just a hundred
tears away.

Sometimes we want to give up but
fools like us, we keep trying.You’re a
long way from someplace you feel safe but peace of mind, it comes from just one
place…